Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth.
Given the explosive growth of data, companies also continue to seek innovative technology for not just protecting data, but also for managing outages and downtime. Certain data applications have such large associated file systems, e.g., production databases comprising petabytes of data, that an outage in the application may require hours, maybe even days, to restore back to the production environment. Thus, although the integrity of production data may be adequately protected from loss by sophisticated backup techniques, the sheer amount of data to be restored may cause unacceptable amounts of downtime.
FIG. 6A illustrates such a scenario, depicting an illustrative timeline of application downtime and recovery in the prior art. The application may be any application that operates in a production environment and which generates and/or accesses very large amounts of production data, e.g., terabytes or petabytes of data. The application may have been deactivated for any number of reasons, e.g., hardware failure, software failure, maintenance, etc. Block 601 illustrates a first set of operations that begin after the application is deactivated. Block 601 may comprise mounting a restore destination to the client computing device that hosts the application, e.g., a database server, and may further comprise executing a full restore operation from a backup copy. Typically, a backup copy may be stored on relatively slower (and less costly) media than the production data, such as tape. Thus, block 601 illustrates a relatively long duration of time required for the terabytes or petabytes of data to be recovered from backup and restored to the relatively fast media used for production, e.g., high-speed disk.
Block 602 illustrates that after the full restore is complete, which may include data integrity checks and audits, the application may be restarted based on the restored backup copy.
During the duration of block 601, the application is in downtime, which, as noted, may be a matter of hours or even days. Accordingly, especially because of the rapidly growing amounts of data to be restored in scenarios such as this one, a need exists for a more speedy and efficient approach.